A recent article in the New York Times, "Why ‘Outsourcing’ May Lose Its Power as a Scare Word" (August 13, 2006), reports some studies done on the effects of outsourcing on the US labor market. Many studies found that only a handful percentage of jobs have been taken away from American workers by low-wage foreign workers overall, and that many more jobs are created for domestic workers than those lost even in sectors where outsourcing has happened in significant numbers:

In December 2005, the McKinsey Global Institute predicted that 1.4 million jobs would be outsourced overseas from 2004 to 2008, or about 280,000 a year. That’s a drop in the bucket. In July, there were 135.35 million payroll jobs in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thanks to the forces of creative destruction, more jobs are created and lost in a few months than will be outsourced in a year. Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, notes that in May 2005 alone, 4.7 million Americans started new jobs with new employers.

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There is evidence that within sectors, lower-paying jobs are being outsourced while the more skilled ones are being kept here. In a 2005 study, Catherine L. Mann, senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, found that from 1999 to 2003, when outsourcing was picking up pace, the United States lost 125,000 programming jobs but added 425,000 jobs for higher-skilled software engineers and analysts.

So it does not seem that outsourcing is going to devastate workers' and their families' lives in developed countries, at least in the US, as some claimed.